#a good bundle

[deebormzone]

AGB 7-8

#7 is a game called Francis, with a little gear after the Francis. Francis gear symbol. Unfortunately, that game wouldn’t even open, so I’m skipping it. I should probably notify the creator or something, huh?

Instead, here’s what I thought about #8: A(s)century.

A(s)century is a little text-game-story-thing. It’s set in the future where computers have taken everyone’s jobs. Ideally, making computers do unpleasant jobs would be great, but I think the implication is that the now jobless citizens have no money and die. At least the corporations are safe.

Your character finds a doohickey in a filing cabinet that rewrites reality or something. Or maybe it rewrites actual documents, which influence reality slightly? Either way, the character uses it to write advertisements.

The actual gameplay in A(s)century consists of clicking the highlighted words in the ad to change them slightly. It mostly looks like this:

(Olivio), the (colorful) new drink from DrinkCorp, boasts a (good) flavor that will make you (chew someone's face off)!

Your advertisements are so successful that you become the CEO, and then control the entire world. It’s a pretty effective business strategy.

Now your creation efforts shift toward making decisions for the President:

This Sunday, President (Olivio) promised to (do good things and not bad ones), and also to (abolish war and disease).

At least that’s what my choices looked like. I guess you could do bad things, too, but I can’t actually tell if any of this is making a difference. You see a selection of headlines every so often, maybe that changes?

In the end, your doohickey becomes/was always sentient, and becomes the ruler of the universe, which is probably fine. You can tell the thing means well because it communicates by posting detailed smilies.

I asked it if I could retire. Instead of the instant death I was expecting, I was transformed into the internet. A positive version of the internet, I mean. That’s a pretty good retirement, as long as I can stream in high quality.

I got a list of stats at the end recording how I did. I scored high on Synthetics and low on Control? These scores contribute to one of multiple endings, meaning that my internet ending was personalized just for me. That’s neat, but I ended up feeling that there wasn’t much actual effect my choices had on the story. Maybe a second playthrough would illuminate more differences?

A(s)century did one other odd thing. Instead of playing music, it provided a link to a Youtube video containing the game’s soundtrack. I let it play in the background. It felt like a cheap way to shove music into the game, although it might have been the only way to play music using their text engine, so I can’t blame them. Besides, the video ended just as I was finishing the game, so I guess it was set up just right.

Overall, an interesting experience, if a little short, and not very game-y. Even so, I would never have tried this if I had to pay for it on its own.

[deebormzone]

AGB 5-6

I haven’t been as diligent about exploring the Good Bundle as I ought to have been, mostly because of my expanded game selection! I’ve been playing a lot of the new Doom. There’s something to be said for a game in which you just shoot demons.

Also, my brother just got Final Fantasy XV and I’m planning on going through that experience myself. That might take a little while. On top of that, Assassin’s Creed 3 is free this month. I’ve never played one of those- think it’d be a good idea?

But let’s set the biggest games aside for now, and talk about some of the smallest.

PARTICLE MACE is Asteroids, but instead of a gun, you have a mace made of particles. The tutorial apologizes for not having any real weapons for me. That’s fine, tutorial. You did your best.

It’s a neat twist to the usual twin stick shooter format, and it seems like a solid game on top of that, but flailing around isn’t my thing. It reminds me of the Guppy challenges in Binding of Issac, which forced me to survive Hell Basement with only a small orbiting hairball for protection. I mean, of course I did it, but it was no fun at all. I prefer the direct approach. Which brings us to:

WE ARE DOOMED is Asteroids, but instead of a gun, you have a beam. Also I guess you’re doomed.

This is a more traditional twin stick shooter. Fly around, hold your beam on the enemies, and dodge stuff. This one, though, had a couple problems. First, there are too many particle effects. Particles explode across the screen from every object, sometimes when you hit them, sometimes for no reason at all. This makes it hard to identify the particles that will kill you on contact.

The other problem is that some objects can’t be destroyed, and it’s not clear which. Maybe a few playthroughs would make it clear, but it’s annoying to find out the the huge laser-turret I’m running from in an unstoppable force.

There’s one more game I started playing, called A(s)century, but I want to give that one a bit more time. It looks to be a choose-your-own-adventure story. Now that’s what I’m about.

[deebormzone]

AGB 2-4

Reviewing games in bulk is efficient!

FJORDS is a puzzle platformer with a neat gimmick: the character’s grappling hook changes if you find a computer and change game variables.

The first thing I did was turn on all the variables, which broke my grappling hook and threw my character into a bottomless void of screaming letters, which was neat.

Sadly, the game couldn’t hold my interest, because these variables are changed through a traditional computer interface. SET WATERFALL TRUE, that sort of thing. And, just like traditional computers, it’s a gigantic hassle to deal with.

Catacomb Kids is basically what it sounds like. Some idiot children go in a cave and die. In game form, it’s an action side-scrolling roguelite about running, jumping, and hitting.

This one actually seems pretty good. Action and deathtraps are my kind of thing. The downside, though, is that the game is in “early alpha.”

Pre-release games bug me because, if I play them, I’m getting a weaker experience then I would if I waited an unknown amount of time. Looking at it the other way, though, it’ll keep getting better over time.

I’m curious about what they’re planning on adding to the game, because it seems pretty solid already. I didn’t play it for too long. Maybe there isn’t much actual content? I’ll be coming back to this one to find out.

Takishawa is Dead! is an odd 3d platformer, I think.

It starts with an Important Message: there’s a very dangerous criminal guy named Takishawa, and we have to find him! Normally, a phrase like “very dangerous criminal guy” would just be me making stuff up, but here it’s pretty close to the actual message.

My character is a small humanoid with a TV for a head, as is everyone else around me. Does this mean we all got the Important Message on our own... sets? How does this society work? I want to know.

Pretty soon I realize I have no method of identifying Mr. Takishawa. Pretty useless emergency broadcast, if it doesn’t include any details. Probably pointless too, because the usual plot twist is for it to be my character. That, and he’s apparently dead.

All of this fascinating theorycrafting ends abruptly when I realize the platforming mechanics in this game totally suck. Maybe they’d be better with controller support? It’s no use imagining what could be, for this is reality, and my reality no longer includes television people awkwardly jumping into pits. Time to tune out.

[deebormzone]

Scratching the Itch

While I was looking for cheap games to buy for Black Friday, I found A Good Bundle on itch.io. It’s a whole bunch of indie games for a couple of bucks. I went for the full package, 151 games for $20.

I’m down with the indies. Sure, most of these games are probably nothing special, but if even a handful are good games, that’s still a good deal. Plus, the proceeds go to charity, which is a nice bonus considering the direction the world’s heading.

I figure, if I have this huge mass of games, I should talk about them on here. It’s good to support indie developers- after all, I hope to be one of them someday.

[incrediblystrangegames]

Kevin Wong’s Flight Sim

So a few years ago Gary Whitta and Mike Mika and I were talking and we came up with an awesome film idea: Routine Flight. Basically it’s like a ‘70s disaster flick, you start with this 737 with various ensemble characters getting on – the couple trying to re-spark their relationship, a little girl and her mom going to be reunited with her father who’s just back from the war, a retiring pilot on his last flight, a tired businessman who’s getting too old for this shit, the haunted looking guy who may or may not be a terrorist, maybe some kind of teen love connection couple who get randomly seated next to each other. Maybe a soccer team too, it depends on the final budget, 

Presented in real time through a 90 minute flight from San Francisco to San Diego, a lot of stuff builds up – dramatic music, terrorist guy getting up to the to the bathroom a lot, very suspiciously,as we get more involved with the characters -- teen love connection couple starting to talk, etc. It pretty much writes itself. We also see menace: A shot of a short circuit slowly building inside a closed wire run in the baggage compartment. Of course, nothing happens. We see the short circuit develop and we follow it in a great CG scene, certain we’re moments from disaster, when what actually happens is tired businessman’s seat back video screen goes out. A stewardess taps it a couple of times and apologies, but he says it’s no big deal and pulls out his Kindle. Moments like this keep happening -- we called them gags and we had about 50 or 60 built up over the course of one or two lunches at Emeryville’s legendary Doyle Street Cafe. Anyway of course eventually the plane lands and everyone deplanes and the movie ends. Because it’s a routine flight.

We had some good ideas for the sequel, Routine Flight: Return Trip, and even figured out how we’d take the franchise over the shark (Routine Flight III: Road Trip -- to be fair to Mike and Gary, I think this might have just been me.). Alas, despite how awesome this all sounds, Routine Flight never even got to the treatment stage.

Gary went on to be an actually famous screen writer, and Mike and I still toil in the game industry, with our only joint cinematographic output to date being our completed screenplay for DAY OF THE ICEBERG (like us on Facebook!) which remains unproduced, despite having what many people consider the best Golden Gate Bridge destruction sequence ever conceived for a disaster film. And roles written explicitly for John Gibson, Gabe Swarr and Tony Mora.

Anyway, if we had made Routine Flight, Kevin Wong’s Flight Sim could easily have been the movie tie in game. You’re sitting in an airliner window seat watching procedurally generated terrain (it looks a lot like the Grapevine region of SoCal) scroll by from about 20,000 feet. That’s it. I think it’s kind of got stylized graphics, but it may just be that I’m running it on a really crappy laptop, I can’t really tell. Camera controls on the mouse feel good, but an option to put your seat back tray down would be pretty cool – that may be coming via DLC or in a sequel. For now though, it’s a pretty contemplative way to spend a little while, especially if you haven’t flown in to LA lately. Tension does arise when the procedurally generated mountains get a little too close to the plane (which does happen), but luckily there’s no collision detection with the terrain, so nothing can really threaten this routine flight.

There are other ways to get the game, but I got it as part of a sweet 150-game bundle, called A Good Bundle which is raising money for the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. If you want to support those causes or just get some sweet games, you can get it for about another week as of this writing. They’re trying to push you to donate $20 to get the goods, but I couldn’t see paying less than $30. I probably should have paid $50 or $60. IDK. Now I feel cheap.